Joshua Allen scripsit:

> How does adding yet another incompatible format help this problem?  And
> for a user who is using RSS 2.0 and their aggregator works just fine,
> why would they care that some techies are arguing about semantics?
> Sounds like the best approach is to just standardize on RSS 2.0.

[Repeat this paragraph seven times, changing the RSS version number
and features.  It's just as valid each time.]

Reuters Health, to provide a concrete datapoint, has been providing RSS 1.0
and RSS 0.91 feeds for a long time.

> You are saying it is a *feature* of a syndication format that you
> require feed authors to keep track of even more metadata?  Half the
> people out there still haven't even figured out how to set the pubDate
> properly.

The "authors", in this sense, of most feeds are blogging tools.

> The same
> people you would need to convince to do it the right way in Atom are the
> people you could just as easily convince to do it the right way in RSS.

Which "right way" is that?

Why don't the Europeans persuade the Americans to use the "right" date
format, DMY?  Why can't the Americans overawe the Europeans into the
"right" date format, MDY?  But no, both of them are now starting to use
the YMD format, at least in IT applications.  Is that for compatibility
with the Japanese?  Hardly.

-- 
John Cowan  jcowan@r...  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."  --Edsger Dijkstra